Education

Teaching

Hello Princetonians! This is my second semester here at Princeton and I am very excited to be precepting again for COS 126. In addition to precepting, I'm also very interested in developing online tools for computer science education. I recently redesigned the COS 126 course website! (Before and after.) If you're interested in any of these things, come chat!

Before coming to Princeton and while I was working on my Ph.D., I taught two high school computer science classes for six years. I developed my own courses at the lovely Hamden Hall Country Day School, a great private day school in Connecticut. I taught "AP Computer Science A" (my old syllabus) -- which covers about a third of the material in Princeton's COS 126, and an introductory course called "Computer Science Principles," based on the new AP course in development by the College Board. For two summers, I also taught an "Introduction to Robotics" class for grades 4-8 at Hamden Hall's Summer Academy.

Mentoring

I am a very hands-on mentor, especially in the design phase of projects. Here are some of my best students.

Sam Spaulding joined the Social Robotics Lab as a Yale freshman in 2010 and collaborated with me on a number of projects and papers. He presented one of our papers at the prestigious Human Robot Interaction conference in 2014. He also did very well on Jeopardy, Millionaire. Sam is currently in graduate school at the MIT Media Center.

Jenny Liu was a junior at Amity High School when she first walked into the Yale Social Robotics Lab. She contributed to one of my earliest projects in grad school. Her name was on the resulting publication, and she won 9th place at the 2011 Intel Science Fair! Jenny is now a Computer Science concentrator at Harvard.

Peter DeLong was a stand-out student in my AP Computer Science class in 2011. He and I worked on a summer project that became a very useful tool for high school students and teachers to find good practice problems for Math League competitions called GNHML. It is still in wide use by students and teachers from all over the district today! Peter matriculated at Princeton in 2014.

Software

I am excited to get the chance to build some tools for teachers and students to improve computer science education. My first task is to improve our internal tools at Princeton, like those used in COS126, WebSheets and the Java Visualizer. Then, I'd like to allow the public to use them, and to build a teacher access point that allows high school teachers to effectively communicate with their students about code through the site.

Research

I did robotics research in grad school. Or, more specifically, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, a combination of robotics and social science. I got my Ph.D. from Yale University, advised by Dr. Brian Scassellati. I built robot tutors that adapted to individual students' needs by building models of individual learning differences upon which robot tutors could personalize their instruction. I'm still happy to advise students in this area, or more broadly in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). If you're interested in this work, please let me know!